Though set in an earlier time, the material covered in Leonie is cut from the same fabric as Bridge to the Sun, the 1961 biopic about Gwen Terasaki starring Carroll Baker as the headstrong Southern girl who married a Japanese diplomat and survived the horrors of life as an outsider in Japan during World War II. Leonie begins in 1901, when the Bryn Mawr graduate goes to work as the New York editor of the talented but still-unknown poet, reluctantly becoming his mentor, co-writer and devoted life partner. Abandoned when she becomes pregnant, she follows Yone (Shidô Nakamura from Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima) to Japan, understanding nothing of the language or culture, and after discovering that Yone already has a Japanese wife, she raises their son Isamu alone, earning a meager income as an English teacher. A firm believer that women ought to have the same rights, responsibilities and freedoms as men, Leonie fights an uphill battle at a time when interracial marriage is not only frowned on but forbidden in America and a social disgrace in Japan. The misery in her own relationship, the joy in her son’s progress—these elements of the story are told through letters to her best friend Catherine (Christina Hendricks, the sexpot office manager on Mad Men). It’s an awkward conceit, and a more traditional narrative form would have been more cinematically satisfying. But what Leonie learns, about customs, rituals and art, and what she teaches, about strength, independence and dignity, are a source of enlightenment for her friends, enemies and students. Especially the talisman she lives by: “When everything else fails, there is always the future.”

With no formal schooling, her son’s unconventional education makes him sort of an early child genius. He designs and builds his first entire house at age 10 for his family, which now includes a baby sister (father unknown). Using his American citizenship to attend school in New York, the boy learns that there are no boundaries and no borders in art. Small wonder that his mother’s influence gave him the drive to become one of the world’s most renowned sculptors and architects until his death in 1988. Alas, there are times when the life of a vagabond woman bridging the gaps between continents, cultures and wars proves too complex and too conflicted to keep the audience focused, which might explain why Leonie has been gathering dust on the editing-room shelf since 2010. Still, it’s a remarkable portrait of a brave, uncompromising woman who maintained her identity and spirit against all odds. Directed by Hisako Matsui and gorgeously shot in the rainy streets of New Orleans, the cherry orchards of Japan and the orange groves of California by acclaimed Japanese cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata, Leonie is a rich tapestry of cross-cultural revelations, released to the public at last, and a welcome addition to an otherwise dreary movie season.

rreed@observer.com

LEONIE

Running Time 102 minutes

Written by Hisako Matsui, David Wiener and Masayo Duus (biography)

Directed by Hisako Matsui

Starring Emily Mortimer, Kazuko Yoshiyuki and Shidô Nakamura

Emily Mortimer.

Love Heals, which benefits The Alison Gertz Foundation for AIDS Education, is having a very fancy gala honoring Dana Auslander, Richard E. Farley and style siren Mary Alice Stephenson, with honorary celebrity chairs Alan Cumming, Julianna Margulies and Emily Mortimer. The committee is equally chichi: Dini von Mueffling, jeweler Alexis Bittar, Chris Burch, Ann Caruso, Armani’s Graziano de Boni, Rory Kennedy, supermodel and The Face TV star Karolina Kurkova, designer Rachel Roy, club queen Amy Sacco and Page Six editor Emily Smith—so refrain from hurling your drink, Real Housewives-style. The benefit includes dinner, drinks and a live auction at power player hub The Four Seasons. Friend tickets are $750, but if you really want to impress the crowd, go for a “Sweetheart Sponsor” table of 10 for $50,000, which gets your name on the step and repeat, meaning you’ll be a brand, all for a great cause.

The Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, (212) 529-7935, cocktails 6:30pm, dinner 7:30pm.

Emily Mortimer. (Getty Images)

We all know that unless you look like Lana Turner and have a fondness for drugstore sodas, breaking into the film industry—even behind the scenes—is tough. Some (sweater) girls really do have all the luck! But for those without matinee-idol looks, there’s Reel Works. Tonight’s bash is raising money to mentor and support high schoolers who hope to study film and be a part of the biz when they’re all grown up. Role models receiving honors at the fete include Emily Mortimer of the now-on-hiatus The Newsroom and Tinseltown’s utility player Jeffrey Wright, next to be seen in the Hunger Games sequel. They will be joined by one lucky teen who’ll win a filmmaking award, in what is hopefully his or her dress rehearsal for winning an Oscar—it’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

Edison Ballroom, 240 West 47th Street, 6:30pm, tickets and information can be found at reelworks.org/rw/Support/galabenefit2012.

Rudd.

Ever since he broke out in the 1995 Jane Austen-goes-to-the-Valley romp Clueless, earning teen idol status for the somewhat questionable act of kissing his underage onscreen step-sister, Paul Rudd has carved out a niche for himself in Hollywood as the go-to hapless everyman. Most of his roles fall into two categories: the hapless, disarming romantic lead (I Love You, Man, How Do You Know), and the hapless, hammy sidekick (Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wet Hot American Summer). But in Our Idiot Brother, a warm and witty comedy from brother-sister team Jesse and Evgenia Peretz, Mr. Rudd has found a perfect role that showcases his considerable charm and comic talent without robbing him of his hap.

This is not to say that Ned, the titular “idiot brother,” isn’t occasionally very unlucky. A laid-back biodynamic farmer fond of Crocs and Fair Isle sweaters, Ned finds himself in jail after naïvely selling pot to a uniformed police officer, only to return home a few months later to find that his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn, sporting a head full of dreadlocks and an air of delightful, deluded self-righteousness) has taken a new lover/farmhand and wants him gone. Robbed of his paycheck, his dignity and his beloved golden retriever, Willie Nelson, Ned moves back in with his mother (Shirley Knight), but soon prevails upon his three Manhattanite sisters to put him up while he figures out his next step. One by one, he unwittingly ruins their lives with his granola-crunchy goodwill.

The oldest sister, Liz (Emily Mortimer), is a mousy, insecure, stay-at-home mom married to pompous documentary filmmaker Dylan (Steve Coogan, in a role that seems to be a send-up of first-time screenwriter—and real life documentarian—David Schisgall). Dylan reluctantly agrees to give Ned a low-paying production assistant job in exchange for free childcare, but neither works out well. To Liz and Dylan’s horror, Ned allows their son, River, to watch The Pink Panther after bedtime and teaches him mixed martial arts after noticing how badly River wants to join a karate class instead of the all-girls modern dance class his parents have enrolled him in. And at work, Ned walks in on Dylan in flagrante with his prima ballerina subject (ever the innocent, Ned buys Dylan’s excuse that nakedness encourages uninhibited interviews).

When Liz and Dylan send him packing, Ned takes up residence on the couch of middle sister Miranda (Elizabeth Banks, playing a variation of her ruthlessly ambitious, utterly narcissistic 30 Rock character), a neurotic Vanity Fair staffer—just like co-writer Evgenia Peretz!—on the verge of her big break: a feature interview with an heiress fresh out of a scandalous relationship that’s been the toast of the tabloids. But Miranda doesn’t have the grace or guts to ask tough questions, coming away with a puff piece about the socialite’s pet charity. It’s only the gregarious Ned who’s able to unwittingly coax the real story out of the buttoned-up, P.R.-wary subject, and Miranda wastes no time in attempting to exploit her brother’s knowledge for professional gain. But Ned’s good intentions get in the way of his sister’s agenda—in addition to sabotaging her article, he meddles in Miranda’s personal life, trying to make sparks fly with her next-door neighbor and best friend, Jeremy (Adam Scott)—and soon he’s pounding the pavement once again.

The final, youngest sister, Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), is a struggling stand-up comedian in a loving lesbian relationship with a woman named Cindy (Rashida Jones, forced for some reason by the costume designer to dress like Peewee Herman) who maintains a dangerous flirtation with a male artist friend (Hugh Dancy). When Natalie makes an impetuous mistake with life-altering ramifications, Ned is there to support her—until he accidentally spills the beans to Cindy. Now all three sisters aren’t speaking to him, he still misses Willie Nelson, and he’s back in jail thanks to an ill-advised heart-to-heart with his parole office (turns out you’re not supposed to tell them when you get high with the kid across the street).

With his Jesus beard, earnest eco-friendliness and childlike naïveté, Ned is unquestionably a stereotype (think The Big Lebowski’s The Dude merged with Tom Hanks in Big), and in the hands of any other actor, his hippie-dippy, laissez-faire follies might become unbearable after the first 30 minutes. But Mr. Rudd imbues Ned with an easy, charming sweetness and unpatronizing wisdom that make him seem simply guileless, not stupid. Indeed, the greatest flaw of Our Idiot Brother is in making Ned too saintly—despite the title, it’s clearly the sisters who are the morons. Petty, vapid and criminally self-absorbed, they blame Ned for being the only person to identify the problems keeping them from being happy … until they realize, in a neat, somewhat lazy wrap-up that qualifies, in Oprah-speak, as an “aha moment,” that by ruining their lives, Ned actually has fixed them. Oh, well. It is to the credit of the filmmakers that they manage to recoup and give the movie an ending that’s as winning and winsome as its star.

Our Idiot Brother may not be perfect, but, Crocs and all, Paul Rudd’s performance is idiot-proof.

ulamarche@observer.com

Running time 90 minutes

Written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall

Directed by Jesse Peretz

Starring Paul Rudd, Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer

3/4

What was the occasion for this unlikely mix of literature, reality TV and fine art? "Divine Comedy," an elaborate themed display of art by the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, now Sotheby's executive, Lisa Dennison. The exhibition, on view through Oct. 19, invites the visitor to Sotheby's to tour hell, heaven and purgatory in the form of artworks depicting each, several of the works spectacular or particularly rare. But despite a gimmicky conceit and lighthearted demeanor--"have fun," urged the wall text, right by a huge crucifix depicting Jesus Christ as a wart-covered frog--the show is very much about money. It represents a new business model for the auctioneer.

Many of the works on view are actually on loan from art galleries--Sperone Westwater and Paul Kasmin among them--seeking to use Sotheby's client list and contacts to market art privately. While it was originally announced that about half of the "Divine Comedy" art is for sale, virtually everything is, Sotheby's later confirmed. Commissions and split of the profits is being decided on a deal-by-deal basis.

London dealer Johnny Van Haeften has lent Franz Francken's 17th-century masterpiece Mankind's Eternal Dilemma--The Choice Between Vice and Virtue, which sold at a European auction for about $7 million; he hopes to flip it for $10 million here.

The show appears designed to generate controversy and attention--a kneeling Hitler is thrown in for good measure, along with that crucified frog, which is a work by Martin Kippenberger that the Pope actually declared blasphemous in 2008. The auctioneer's celebrity client list was used for the opening party. (The resulting "gets" were Julianne Moore, Emily Mortimer and Alan Cumming.)

Ms. Dennison granted the financial motives for the show--"We are an auction house," but said the show had provided viewers the opportunity to see "remarkable works" that otherwise would never have been on public view. As for courting controversy, Ms. Dennison said that's not the case, but "we couldn't ignore art that comments outside established traditions."

Drafted into all this was James Frey, who is co-owner of a Lower East Side art gallery--Half Gallery--and has written several art-catalog essays. He was on hand to sign a limited-edition exhibition catalog that featured his "Il Divino Bambino," a reinterpretation of Dante's story. He declined to discuss his compensation, and said he was very surprised at how many people wanted a signed catalog--"I thought I'd do two and be done with it." Interestingly, the famous dissembler said that his two favorite works in the show were the Francken and the only "fake" chosen for the whole exhibition, a particularly harsh version of the afterlife painted not by a famous artist but by his "follower," i.e., copycat. "I love the fake Bosch," he said.

Update 10/8, 10:30 a.m.

The Observer's own Amir Shoucri was treated to a preview of the collection, and produced the stellar video below. Check it out!

Sotheby's Takes You to Hell from The New York Observer on Vimeo.

Following in the worn avenger footprints of early gut-riddled Clint Eastwood crime melodramas, Charles Bronson in Death Wish and even Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Mr. Caine plays the title role—an elderly pensioner who lives in a crumbling old London housing project minding his own business, dividing his time between hospital visits to see his ailing wife and chess games at the pub with his only friend, a fellow veteran named Leonard. Life is uneventful until his wife dies and Leonard falls prey to the warring drug gangs that hang out in a nearby underpass, shooting heroin and harassing seniors. They leave excrement in mail boxes, spit on defenseless invalids and kill women and children just for sport. Distraught when the police offer no solution and enraged when they release the thugs who stabbed Leonard, Harry takes the law into his own hands. This is one old geezer whom it’s better not to mess with. Like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, Harry also happens to be an ex-Marine—no stranger to guns and knives, he spent years battling the IRA in Ulster. When this rheumy-eyed, stumbling old war veteran goes on a rampage, look out. Or, better still, look the other way. This is not Noël Coward’s London, but a bleak toilet hole overrun with youthful zombies, snarling at authority and collecting lethal weapons in the way some kids collect video games.

The cops (Ian Glen and a miscast Emily Mortimer, giving her first dull screen performance) are either helpless, complacent or smug. So Harry goes underground to buy an automatic, into a dark subterranean midnight world of predatory human vermin so vile they seem to have been dreamed up by Hieronymus Bosch. Bones shatter, heads are blown away and the population trembles. The film goes to great lengths to make Harry a hero (“He’s doing us a favor,” says the police inspector), and it ultimately becomes a celebration of a vigilante aesthetic. Praise the octogenarian mavericks, it preaches. They’re our only salvation.

It makes for a repellent but not uninteresting panorama of bloody carnage in which Harry, with pistols blazing, rids society of the rats and snakes before they multiply. But encouraging criminal chaos seems morally dubious to me. When the police finally try to crack down, the underworld retaliates, burning down the neighborhood, driving everyone in uniform away in terror and intimidation, and the movie turns surreal. Freshman director Daniel Barber and writer Gary Young insist everything is true—that today’s England is, in fact, worse than anything shown here. But Harry Brown is so deliberately sick and twisted that many scenes fail the credibility test and pessimism reigns throughout. It must be said that even when it moves from social realism to grotesque sensationalism, the film makes the most of a great actor’s resources. Mr. Caine is impeccable in a fastidious performance of contrast and compassion—lonely and subdued at first, ashen-faced with his world in ruins; then hot as a branding iron in the flush of revenge. The ugly stuff in this movie is so over the top that sometimes you are forced to stifle a laugh, but the star always comes through. So good that he even makes you feel sorry for him, he is the driving force that keeps an otherwise despicable movie alive, and saves the audience from hysterics.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 97 minutes
Written by: Gary Young
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring:  Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Ian Glen

2 Eyeballs out of 4

But Ms. Mortimer, 36, found confidence in her character, Joy, who struts around her suburban home in butt-hugging skirts and spike-heeled shoes. Joy and her demolitions-expert husband, Ned (played by Chris Bauer, familiar as Frank Sobotka in The Wire’s second season), are having a mid-marriage crisis. “He’s this guy who spends his whole time blowing buildings up and has completely lost his ability to have a conversation about anything that matters because he’s so terrified,” explained Ms. Mortimer, who was calling from Boerum Hill, where she lives with actor hubby Alessandro Nivola and 4-year-old son Samuel. “I’m sort of trying to somehow make him face up to the truth and go deeper. It’s very twisted and fucked up, but what I’m saying is, I identify with her.” Ms. Mortimer’s friend Jonathan Cake plays their amiable next-door neighbor. (She calls him “Cakey.”)

After Ms. Mortimer toasts opening night on March 5, she’ll fly to Boston to shoot Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, playing a patient who escaped from a mental hospital. “I have to play dead in a pile of bodies,” Ms. Mortimer said. “But I shouldn’t complain, that’s probably the best job you can get when you’re hung over.”

Parlour Song plays through March 29 at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. For tickets visit www.ticketcentral.com

The offfical hosts were actresses Emily Mortimer, Amanda Peet, Ginnifer Goodwin (gorgeous in person if not in Big Love), Joy Bryant, Catalina Sandino Moreno (of Maria Full of Grace), and Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive, resplendent in a Sari Gueron dress and Prada shoes.
All the furniture in the apartment had been removed, and large pictures of Ugandan villagers adorned the walls. Five design teams, including Jojovich-Hawk (as in former model Milla Jojovich and Carmen Hawk) had created special T-shirts whose purchase would benefit Malaria No More, an organization that provides mosquito-stopping bed nets to African households. They are retailing at Shopbop.com for $68, making them the cheapest piece of clothing we’ve glimpsed so far this Fashion Week.

We spoke to one Martin Edlund, a representative for Malaria No More: a do-gooder in a room full of look-gooders—who insisted on being interviewed underneath one of his organization’s “bed nets,” which hung from the ceiling. “[Glamour] liked the fact that bed nets have a connection to textiles,” he said, which sounded a bit peculiar to us, but we went with it. “Also, Malaria is a women’s issue. 3,000 mothers bury their children every day from Malaria.”
Mr. Edlund seemed to be enjoying himself. “I’m not as noble as you think,” he said.

Hostage is all the pulp thriller Bruce Willis movies you've seen before. Based on one of those Robert Crais books you see commuters tossing into trash bins in Amtrak stations, it follows the dots until that's all you can see with your eyes closed. Spilling vicious carnage from beginning to end, it opens with a lot of extraneous brutality when a small boy and his mother are murdered in cold blood and Mr. Willis, a hostage-management expert for the LAPD, is unable to control the situation or change the outcome. This has nothing to do with the rest of what happens in Hostage, but serves the sole purpose of establishing the star's sensitive side. When the bodies stack up, he needs a hug.

A year later, he's left the L.A. stress behind and we find him working as a police chief in a small precinct in Ventura, bald and devoid of the old moxie, with a crumbling marriage and a lot of guilt. Not much crime here, until three punks follow a wealthy accountant and his two kids to their ugly palatial estate (designed by the kind of California architect that should be under house arrest for defiling the landscape) and try to steal their S.U.V. But things go awry and they end up killing a lady cop and holding the family hostage. Time for Bruce Willis to answer his mobile. His eyes squint, his Adam's apple throbs, his jaw locks, and the master class is in session at the Bruce Willis School of Dramatic Arts. He's hopping mad now, and out for bear. No matter that it's the same formulaic stuff he's been doing in his sleep since Die Hard. As Mae West used to say, still rolling her hips in her 80's, "My fans, uh, expect it of me."

O.K., so your typical pulp-fiction ensemble-the wealthy father, the sexy daughter and the brilliant adolescent boy who knows a lot about technology and guns-waits inside the locked security vault with a view they call home and wait for the star to rescue them. But this dad (Kevin Pollak) is no flag-waving retro patriarch from sitcom hell. He's a crooked bookkeeper who launders money for the mob and keeps all of the illegal account data on a secret disc inside a DVD cover of Heaven Can Wait. The plot morphs to the consistency of triple-cut thick-sliced baloney-er, bacon-when yet another gang of murderous psychos kidnaps Bruce Willis' own family in an attempt to get their hands on that DVD of Heaven Can Wait. And not because they want to catch Warren Beatty as a ball-playing angel, either.

Now Mr. Willis has two sets of hostages to rescue, not to mention two separate stories, when he can scarcely handle one. The delinquents inside (headed by creepy, eye-twitching Ben Foster, who plays the crazy art student on the TV series Six Feet Under) panic and burn the house down. The gangsters outside, who show up masquerading as the F.B.I., are played by the smartest actors in the movie because they all wear masks. Meanwhile, the girl hostage is stripped and humiliated and almost raped, while her little brother, pursued bloody and screaming through the crawl space into the ventilation ducts of the burning house, finds the DVD inside the Heaven Can Wait jacket label. But this movie is not over. What nobody figured on was the fact that there are two movies with the same title. The Heaven Can Wait the ruthless killers want is the 1943 version with Don Ameche and Gene Tierney, not the one from 1978 with Warren Beatty. And so while everybody is bleeding to death and talking to each other on cell phones, I kept thinking, "What we have here, inadvertently of course, is a movie about cold-blooded killers with good taste in movies."

Nothing so hip ever emerges on the screen. The acting is from hunger. The action is so predictable that even the noise barely registers on the Hollywood Richter scale. The profanity and gore is piled on by French director Florent Siri, making his English-speaking film debut. He has a lot to learn, and he can start with the language.

Catfight!

Occasionally, I have found myself trapped on a rainy Saturday morning with the television in the background tuned to an alarming, mean-spirited subculture of teenage crime shows featuring big-breasted Amazonian crime solvers who can wipe out regiments of gangsters and crack a villain's head open like a walnut using nothing but their thighs. I've stared incredulously at this garbage, grateful that I cover bad movies, not bad television. But now the bets are off. A whole gang of bone-crunching teens have been unleashed in D.E.B.S. It's enough to make you pray for a revival of Junior Miss.

D.E.B.S. is a secret society of spies who have passed a secret test hidden within their SAT exams that reveals a supersonic talent for lying, killing, maiming, destroying fast cars and tracking rats to the holes where they play bad disco music. It's a secret sorority of dangerous and extremely boring Valley Girls in pleated plaid miniskirts who are more at home with a pistol than a parasol. Instead of showing off their Jimmy Choo shoes at Spago, they're pulling grenades on contract killers and saving hostages locked in bank vaults of solid steel. They address their roommates affectionately as "bunk bitch." Their biggest challenge is a villainous lesbian (in movies like this, the two are seldom mutually exclusive) named Lucy Diamond, the last surviving member of a crime syndicate of diamond smugglers. No D.E.B. has ever fought her and lived. Now Lucy is back in town, trying to get laid and participating in dialogue like, "So you're an assassin. How does that work?" "Mostly freelance. I really wanted to be a dancer." But history is about to be made when Amy, the sweetest, blondest Barbie in the D.E.B. doll collection, falls in love with Lucy and goes over to the dark side. In D.E.B. country, that's not just putting tax-free contributions for same-sex marriage laws to work. It's also treason.

While the whip-cracking D.E.B. director-played by Holland Taylor, who seems to have modeled her performance and her pink suits after Martha Stewart-yells, "This is not the Girl Scouts! This is espionage!" (Ms. Taylor must be a great actress to say a line like that with a straight face. But don't forget-she once starred in the biggest one-night flop in Broadway history, called Moose Murders), Amy knows it's not in the D.E.B. rulebook to betray your friends and country for a lesbian fling with a supervillain. I mean, would James Bond spend the night in the arms of Dr. No? So she tells Lucy she really wants to go to art school in Barcelona "when I rid the world of people like you." Then they go into a lip lock. Meanwhile, the lurid Lucy falls so hard that "being bad doesn't feel good anymore." Eventually, the other D.E.B.S.-a chain-smoking sexaholic, a borderline psychotic and a thief with a rap sheet-swallow a liberal pill and pool their talents to see that Amy and Lucy give up the F.B.I., C.I.A. and Homeland Security and find a happy ending in the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. In the end, they get perfect scores on their missions and get the highest award bestowed on a dedicated D.E.B.-the Mary Jane!

God only knows what delusional audience this fiasco hopes to attract. Moral-issues advocates and protectors of family values will be outraged. And unless I know nothing about the world of today's youth (which probably goes without saying), I predict that few teenagers are stupid enough to emerge from it without yawning. It has been suggested that the producers hand out lapel buttons to every member of the audience that reads: "I SURVIVED D.E.B.S.!!" The nauseating camerawork has lipstick traces on the lens. The amateur-level writing and lame direction, both by Angela Robinson, seem to have been inspired by an overactive thyroid gland and funneled through a pink soda-fountain straw. Oh, yes: D.E.B.S. stands for "Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength"-none of which is remotely detectable in a single frame. The girl-power super sleuths on their way to a Hugh Hefner audition are all unknowns. They will remain that way.

Phantom Fathers

For the perfect lump of sugar to stabilize so much acid, the British film Dear Frankie is a soft-hearted but soberly made little movie that gives sentimentality a good name. Frankie is a 9-year-old deaf child whose abusive father deserted the family, leaving the lonely son he never knew to be raised by a struggling single mom and a nicotine-addicted grandmother who always pretends the man of the house is perennially away at sea. Frankie's well-meaning mother Lizzie (the splendid Emily Mortimer, who looks amazingly like Margot Kidder) keeps the boy's spirits up by writing him affectionate letters he believes are from his missing dad-and even encloses exotic stamps from foreign ports. As a result, the boy is obsessed with all things nautical while living ashore with the two women above a fish-and-chips shop where the meals are a sorry substitute for the adventurous marine life of his fantasies. Lizzie has devoted so many years to the hoax that Frankie's father is a good man who loves his son that she has sadly lost hope of any life of her own. Complications arise on the day a real merchant ship called the H.M.S. Accra (the name of the vessel she made up) docks in the Glasgow harbor, and the false image of Frankie's dad that Lizzie has created threatens to blow up in her face unless she finds a man who is willing to pretend he is Frankie's father for a day of shore leave.

Of course, the bloke she hires not only plays the role to the hilt, but enhances the elaborate fiction in his own charming way, wins the hearts of both the boy and his mother, and transforms their lives. Played by handsome, charismatic hunk Gerard Butler, the doomed but sexy Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, this warm, sympathetic stranger may be too perfect to be true, but the feel-good effect is so bracing that I don't think you'll mind. His invitation to join the family triangle for the bogus "reunion" injects a massive dose of what everyone's been missing into the household dynamic. His mixture of masculinity and vulnerability sends shock waves through Lizzie's tightly constructed little universe and gives Frankie a new star status in the Boys Who Have Dads Club. When he leaves, the people on the screen are not the only ones with tears in their eyes. Life resumes on a happier plane until Frankie's real father materializes, demanding to see his son one last time before he dies of cancer. Never underestimate the intelligence of a child. Frankie has gained a wisdom more profound than any of the grownups envisioned, and Jack McElhone, the youngster who plays him, is endearingly convincing; his sweetness and humanity provides a precise and gentle ballast for the chaos around him. Shona Auerbach is a director to watch, but as a cinematographer she makes objects glow, imbued with light that bounces off water and skin, heightening the boy's expressions as he reads lips and adding more heat to a chemistry between Ms. Mortimer and Mr. Butler that is already hot enough to fry an egg. Few things are more rewarding in movies today than a gentle, perceptive and beautifully honed exploration of the vagaries of the human heart. Dear Frankie provides this reward, and more.